


April Showers Bring May Flowers

by Cipher_the_Sidhe



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Challenge Response, Comfort, Nightmares, dark topics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:13:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29587746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cipher_the_Sidhe/pseuds/Cipher_the_Sidhe
Summary: Gaster reflects on the things that grew in him in the Void, and what grows between the two of you now. (WARNING! Dark themes)
Relationships: W. D. Gaster/Reader
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5
Collections: Gaster's Followers February 2021





	April Showers Bring May Flowers

It's not quite true that nothing grows in the dark.

This is something Gaster had learned quickly in the Void. Bereft of light, countless horrible thoughts found root in the bed of his skull and began to flourish, leeching the hope and love and sanity out of him for their food. Like wild fungi, the thoughts ate away at him bit by bit, until little more than shadow and bone shard was left, floating lost and unaware of himself through the nothingness. The Void holds onto nothing. It swallows and slowly, slowly digests, and from the seeds it sows grows only despair. 

The doctor was little more than the fractured ghost of memory when your light reached him, precious blue like water in the desert, clear cyan like his long lamented sky. It was almost painful at first, how...solid, how existent your soul was within that nowhere place. The specter of him had flinched and cowered from the silver-blue light of you for what he might have guessed was seconds or years (It was three days, you'd told him later, before you'd felt him sway toward you). Steadily, the sting of your light eased and morphed into an almost euphoric balm against his own scorched, blackened soul. 

It's not unlike this feeling now, with your fingertips trailing slowly and gently over his skull, tracing a careful path over the cracks in his bone that your lips follow with healing kisses. He lies pillowed on your chest, rocked by the steady rhythm of your heartbeat, and does his damnedest to hold the shadows of himself together. The first night you'd found him like this– shaking, sobbing, and uncoiling where the solid bone of what's left of him melts into the dense inky mist that the Void left in place of his legs– you'd frowned, set your jaw, and returned a moment later with an extra pillow and a declaration that you'd be sleeping in this room with him from now on, thankyouverymuch. 

He almost argued, that first night, but then your hands had pulled him close and he'd nearly wailed with the relief of it. The nights since had been enlightening. You snore lightly in your sleep, and no matter how you start the night you end it curled around him with your fingers tangled in his coat to grip at his back. You don't like to fall asleep before him, and usually fill those first sleepy moments with sweetly rasped lullabies or stray details of your shared lives that you think will please him. 

One night, you're whispering against his skull about those days and weeks when you were still on separate sides of the gray door. You'd come looking for him, though he was no one to you and even his friends had long since given up on the hope that he might come back. They'd spoken of him as an old hurt to be mourned, not as something still festering waiting for aid. But you. You'd just known, you told him, that if you could manage to be patient and somehow stay there in the dark with him, that'd he'd be able to find his way home. You searched for the tiniest trace of a man in that darkness before you found him, and then you'd pursued with no hesitation. You were fearless and Stars, Angel, anyone power that was out there _he did not deserve you! _He cried when you told him, smothering his hiccuping sobs into your shoulder while you cooed comforting words against his skull. A scattered handful of times, as uncertain as dreaming, he'd stumbled upon moments of reality. You were not the first soul to open that gray door. But he didn't think anyone would come looking. He certainly didn't expect to be found. He'd long since stopped believing he deserved to be, after all.__

____

He knows that you have nightmares of your own that make you whimper and clutch at him in the night– the price you pay for waiting for him to follow your light out of that perfect darkness, no matter how fearlessly you'd gone in– but there is nothing so precious to him as your patient soul, which looked for him, found him, and waited. Humans are truly strong beyond comprehension. Or perhaps it's just that it was you who did it that allowed you the resolve to step into that corrosive Void and lock your legs, unyielding, to wait for a stranger you could not be sure there was enough of to save. 

____

This soothing ritual of yours happens frequently enough. Frequent as his nightmares, where the darkness finished pulling him apart, or, worse, the ones where it swallowed you whole too. One of your delicate hands traces the contours of his skull and ribs and spine while the other grips one of his own holey palms, offering him an unshakable lifeline. You plant kisses over him following the trail of your fingers, which till the substance of his mind, turning rancid, rotting thoughts into something healing and fresh and alive. Your whispered assurances and affections and plentiful 'I love you's sow a garden in his mind and soul that you dutifully tend until it blooms, vibrant, beautiful, and so, so full of light. You weed out the darkness and plant shining cyan flowers in his soul, and he is at peace in your patient embrace. 

____


End file.
